Breakfast of Champions - or so it seems if you accept this Economist history of wheat, Ears of plenty - The story of man's staple food.

IN 10,000 years, the earth's population has doubled ten times, from less than 10m to more than six billion now and ten billion soon. Most of the calories that made that increase possible have come from three plants: maize, rice and wheat. The oldest, most widespread and until recently biggest of the three crops is wheat (see chart). To a first approximation wheat is the staple food of mankind, and its history is that of humanity.

It continues with a pocket history of humanity and wheat that is both interesting and informative though many who have detailed knowledge of some aspect of that sweeping history will find much to quibble about.

A theme that weaves through the story is successive technological improvements in agronomics that averted disaster - everything from the horse collar to the green revolution. Each technology allowed more wheat to be grown or less land to be used to do so. In each case reactionaries opposed what we know in hindsight to be simple good sense.

In 1701 AD the Berkshire farmer Jethro Tull devised a simple seed drill based on organ pipes, which resulted in eight times as many grains harvested for every grain sown. Like most agricultural innovators since, he was vilified. A century later the threshing machine was greeted by riots. . . On farms, Haber nitrogen ran into much the same revulsion as had greeted the seed drill. For many farmers, the goodness of manure could not be reduced to a white powder.

In recent times all of the roles are still played. Some find ways to improve agriculture and some wallow in despair.

After an epiphany in a taxi in a crowded Delhi street, the environmentalist Paul Ehrlich wrote a best-seller arguing that the world had “too many people”. Not only could America not save India; it should not save India. Mass starvation was inevitable, and not just for India, but for the world.

Borlaug refused to be so pessimistic. He arrived in India in March 1963 and began testing three new varieties of Mexican wheat. The yields were four or five times better than Indian varieties. In 1965, after overcoming much bureaucratic opposition, Swaminathan persuaded his government to order 18,000 tonnes of Borlaug's seed. Borlaug loaded 35 trucks in Mexico and sent them north to Los Angeles. The convoy was held up by the Mexican police, stopped at the border by United States officials and then held up by the National Guard when the Watts riots prevented them reaching the port. Then, as the shipment eventually sailed, war broke out between India and Pakistan.

As it happened, the war proved a godsend, because the state grain monopolies lost their power to block the spread of Borlaug's wheat. Eager farmers took it up with astonishing results. By 1974, India's wheat production had tripled and India was self-sufficient in food; it has never faced a famine since.

We are where we have always been - at the edge of our abilities with more mouths to feed than we can quite manage, and more on the way. There are some differences in trends since the rate of increase has slowed and we foresee a peak population of 9 or 10 billion mid-century.

This is an extraordinary development, unexpected, undeserved—and apparently unnatural. Human beings may be the only creatures that have fewer babies when they are better fed. The fastest-growing populations in the world over the next 50 years will be those of Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Somalia, Uganda and Yemen. All except in Yemen are in Africa. All are hungry. All remain untouched by Borlaug's green Revolution: all depend on primarily organic agriculture.

In 10,000 years the population has doubled at least ten times. Yet suddenly the doubling has ceased. It will never double again. The end of humanity's population boom will happen in the lifetimes of people alive today. It is the moment when Malthus was wrong for the last time.

Of course feeding ten billion will not be trivial. It will require at least 35% more calories than the world's farmers grow today, probably much more if a growing proportion of those ten billion are to have meat more than once a month. (It takes ten calories of wheat to produce one calorie of meat.) That will mean either better yields or less rainforest—which is why fertilisers, pesticides and transgenes are the best possible protectors of the planet. The story of wheat is not finished yet.

Is it true? Are "fertilisers, pesticides and transgenes . . . the best possible protectors of the planet". Well, yes, no and not precisely as stated. For example, Haber nitrogen is a planetary protector that overcomes the one step forward one step back problem of manures since no land is consumed in their production, but we have been doing it wrong. The Illinois Soil Nitrogen Test (ISNT) has been shown to be pure hokum, not just empirically wrong but scientifically indefensible, and so farmers have been using nitrogen at rates that have no connection with requirements. More importantly, the amount needed depends on many factors since the amount available to plants and usable by plants depends on the balance of soil nutrients. Balanced fertility allows more to be achieved with less nitrogen, and thus less unintended consequences of nitrogen use. Similar examples can be developed for pesticides and transgenes.

In addition to the noted caveats about the use of new technologies there are more rational ways to use land than growing wheat (or maize or rice for that matter). A big problem for all these grains is that they are annual grasses. It's also why we prize them since the survival strategy of an annual grass is to grow quickly and produce copius seed to launch its genome into the future. Then it dies. We value the seed too but consider the rest of the plant to be waste. We can't eat grass leaves, stems and roots. Well, we could but we can't digest them and get food energy. We have poor digestive systems. Only a tiny percentage of the total production from these grasses is actually food for us.

So, each year we have to go through the whole rigamarole of tilling and sowing just to be able to do some reaping. Some, such as Wes Jackson at The Land Institute, think that's a serious defect. If we could create perennial grasses that also produced lots of seed then we would get more food for less cost and avoid a fair amount of environmental devaststaion as well. Perennial plants have a very different survival strategy. Instead of fast growth and lots of seed they are in it for the long haul, pace themselves and produce few seeds. They even clone themselves by sending out daughter shoots. Teaching them to produce lots of seed is a nice idea in a way, but progress is slow thus far.

Grain just isn't a very sensible food. We could produce lots more food with the same effort and resources with modern technologies. We could just grow goo in vats. A high percentage of that would be edible and digestible by humans. Even flesh could be cultured this way, the techno-vegetarian dream. Grain came to dominate our history because it can be stored over the winter, not because it is good food that can be efficiently produced. As noted in the article:

Agriculture brought drudgery, subjugation and malnutrition, because unlike hunter-gatherers, farmers could eke out a living when times were bad. But at least that meant that they could survive. Population growth was now inevitable. Within a few generations, wheat farmers were on the march, displacing and overwhelming hunter-gatherers as they went . . .

Wherever they went, the farmers brought their habits: not just sowing, reaping and threshing, but baking, fermenting, owning, hoarding.

Hoarding. That's the key. A gang of bullies could shake down the farmers for a portion of their stored grain. And so kings, priests, taxes, class hierarchies and the rest of civilization resulted.

The way the article tells it there were two life style choices: farming or hunting and gathering. But that misses herding. All the while that farmers were ripping up the land herders were following their livstock from pasture to pasture. They didn't store things, or even have many possessions, since that would mean that they had to carry them about. Their livestock was self propelled, self feeding and self replicating. No sowing, just reaping.

This is an important idea to grasp. Though nomadic herders didn't develop urban civilization and the technological advances a sedentary, hierarchical existence made possible, they did have a pretty good food production system that efficiently converted inedible materials into edible materials. The claim of the article that "It takes ten calories of wheat to produce one calorie of meat" is just dumb since animals don't eat just the wheat seeds, they eat the whole plant. Better yet, they eat more productive grasses, including the perennials Jackson admires, and get much more food per unit of land than people can with their seeds.

When we combine the technologies developed by those sedentary urban societies with the agronomic insights of the herders we get a far better food production system. Growing better grasses and legumes as forage for herds can produce more calories for humans than growing grains, but more importantly it produces higher quality food rich in protein.

We need to go beyond the mantra that "fertilisers, pesticides and transgenes . . . the best possible protectors of the planet" to see that they are just tools in the kit that must be used intelligently to be valuable. Those who chafe at the various problems of the green revolution such as chemical pollution, loss of bio-diversity, water use, erosion etc. etc. aren't just Luddites. They have a point though they seldom have a good understanding of the whole system and never have good policy prescriptions.

You may be squicked out by the idea of eating goo from vats or even squicked out about eating livestock, but they are both less harmful to the planet than growing grains when managed intelligently. They are tools in the kit too and allow us to reduce the use of the "fertilisers, pesticides and transgenes" that worry some critics.

Continuing to improve our knowledge of plants and soil so that we can produce food with fewer inputs and less unintended consequences, and avoiding counter-productive behaviors such as feeding grain to livestock seems a better way to protect the planet than any of the specific technologies involved. The technologies will change over time but the big picture, whole system habit of mind will always yield benefits.